02-07-2025
He pioneered the cellphone. It changed how people around the world talk to each other — and don't
The phone is about to become a thinking computer
Now, the winner of the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation — the United States' highest honor for technological achievement – is focused on the cellphone's imminent transition to a thinking mobile computer fueled by human calories to avoid dependence on batteries. Our new parts will run constant tests on our bodies and feed our doctors real-time results, Cooper predicts.
Human behavior is already adapting to smartphones, some observers say, using them as tools that allow overwhelmed minds to focus on quality communication.
The phone conversation has become the way to communicate the most intimate of social ties, says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of 'America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.'
For almost everyone, the straight up phone call has become an intrusion. Now everything needs to be pre-advised with a message.
'There seems to be a sense that the phone call is for heart-to-heart,' Fischer says.
And this from a 20-year-old corroborates that: 'The only person I call on a day-to-day basis is my cousin,' says Ayesha Iqbal, a psychology student at Suffolk County Community College. 'I primarily text everyone else.'
When she was a girl, Karen Wilson's family shared a party line with other phone customers outside Buffalo, New York, and had to wait to use the phone if someone else was on. Wilson, 79, shocked her granddaughter by telling her about the party line when the girl got a cellphone as a teenager.
'What did you do if you didn't wait?'' the girl asked. Responded her grandmother: '`You went down to their house and you yelled, 'Hey, Mary, can you come out?''
